With the start of 2018 we’ll be able to present more poetry from India on Lyrikline thanks to a newly established partnership in India.The Enchanting Verses Literary Review and poet and editorSonnet Mondalas its country-editor for India take care of the selection and recording of new Indian poets. Their first contribution to Lyrikline is poetAnju Makhijaand we’re glad that more new voices are already being prepared.

Many thanks to Sonnet Mondal not only for his efforts in presenting Indian poetry but also for an insight into poetry in India he compiled, giving us an idea about the developments from the beginning to today, the diversity of languages and the various traditions of this rich poetry universe of India.

Poetry from India (by Sonnet Mondal)

The literary history and tradition of India spins around poetry. From the Vedic times to the 21st century, Indian poetry has come a long way through epics, cultural intersections, conquests, devotion, local dialects, and festivals. Vedvyasa’s Mahabharata, considered as the longest epic poem in the world is so huge that there’s a saying — ‘What’s missing in the Mahabharata doesn’t exist in India’. With 110,000 couplets in eighteen sections — this epic is about seven times the combined length of Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey. Other India epics that substantially used poetry as the medium of expression were — Valmiki’s Ramayana, Māgha’s ShishupalaVadha, Māgha’s Kiratarjuniya, Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita and Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda. Even in these times — poetry flourished in other languages — in other parts of the country. The Sangam literature era — from 300 BC to 300 AD contains about 2381 poems in Tamil composed by 473 poets from diverse backgrounds. The Bhakti movement during the 15th and 17th century AD saw an emergence of devotional poetry, the influence of which still remains contemporary. Influenced by Vedic beliefs — the works of poets like Andal, Kabir, Tulsidas, Ramananda, Tukaram, Mirabai, and Narsinh Mehta still remain a muse of the post-post modern period.

Though most of the early Indian poetry appeared in Sanskrit — there was a shift in course of language towards the medieval period. Amir Khusrau penned mainly in Persian, but composed almost half a million verses in Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Braj Bhasha, Hindavi as well as the Khadi Boli. Later Hindus started writing in Persian and this led to the development of Indo-Persian literature. The Abd-Allāh cites over 130 names of Hindu-Persian poets who lived in the late 18th and 19th century. The first evidence of a Hindu writing Persian poetry is attributed to a Brahmin named Pandit Dungar Mal. In late 17th century — Sikhs also started contributing to the Persian poetry of India, and Guru Gobind Singh himself wrote an extensive Persian poem — Zˈafarnāma.

From Jayadeva in 12th century and Amir Khusrau in the 15th century, to Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Tagore in the 19th Century, poetry in Indian vernaculars reigned supreme. The father of Bengali Sonnet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt brought a revolution by penning the famous tragic epic — Meghnad Bodh Kavya and also by introducing blank verse in Bengali poetry.

The local and regional languages first encountered English in the beginning of the 18th century — with the break-up of the Mughal empire to British India. The first Nationalist Poet of Modern India- Henry Louis Vivian Derozio — considered the father of Indian English Poetry wrote in English and was much influenced by the English Romantic poets. Tagore translated his own work into English — in his book Gitanjali. Later, Nissim Ezekiel and A.K. Ramanujan wrote much under the influence of post-war American Poets and some British poets like Wilfred Owen. Ramanujan travelled to America in 1959 and stayed in Chicago until his death in 1993. He wrote profusely during these years.Indian English poetry- from Derozio and Toru Dutt through Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan and Jayanta Mahapatra to present day poets is recognized worldwide. It has come up as a form that has its own tradition, lyrical quality, approach, delivery and style. Inspite of the surge of Indian English literature, regional language literature through the hundreds of languages spoken in India today — has remained close to the hearts of readers. Regional languages in the country has given rise to many countries within one country bounded by boundaries without lines. Regional poetry in India, allows an insight into the diverse depictions and presentation of same things by different regions of India.

Delving into Indian poetry, is like descending an age old cave in search of minerals, wall arts and history. Selecting poets for Lyrikline cannot be all inclusive but there would be a constant quest to include the best contemporaries from various Indian languages.

Sonnet Mondal is the author of Ink and Line and five other books of poetry. Winner of the 2016 Gayatri Gamarsh Memorial Award for literary excellence, Mondal was one of the authors of the ‘Silk Routes’ project of the IWP, University of Iowa, from 2014 to 2016. He is the editor-in-chief of the Enchanting Verses Literary Review, and lives in Kolkata.

This series is part of a project that investigates poetry translation as a correspondence between author and translator. For this translation, I took Marion Poschmann’s original poems and translated them in two ways: first by attempting to faithfully retain as much of the original content from the German version as possible; and then by writing new poems that directly responded to each of her texts. In this way, non-German-speaking readers gain insight into the German text through these two distinct vantage points. There is also a third sort of “translation” going on here: a visual representation of the translation act itself. Using various design elements, I attempted to show the movement and relationship between all three versions of each text, depicting a sense of call and response, as well as enforcing the notion of creative translation as an evolving form of interpretation.

Sharmila Cohen lives in Berlin, where she initially moved on a Fulbright Scholarship to investigate poetry in translation and now works as a freelance writer, translator, and editor. She is a co-founding editor of the translation press Telephone Books. Her work can be found in Harper’s Magazine, Circumference, and Epiphany, among other places.

German poet Marion Poschmann was asked to be this year’s lyrikline curator, tasked with selecting four German speaking poets to be recorded for the website in 2017. She will introduce her selections at an event at Haus für Poesie in Berlin on November 16, 2017.

Presenting poetry from Burundi is not an easy task. T.S. Eliot seemed to think true poetry is hardly translated, and one needs to truly sense where those words are from. Until the emergence of the modern, there was no need of presentingpoetry, for poetry was part of life.

….do you feel her drive?
Look at his eyes,
Do you read his verse? [1]

But the unity of life, some will say, was lost with the last myth and cosmic societies, that Burundi belonged to until a century ago. Dissolved by the increasing requirements of the modern world, several separate and independent spheres were born. One of them, the arts and culture, has grown (often unwillingly) to acquire the function of precisely representing the lost unity.

Beyond their powers to express the various contradictions and sensitivities, the world literature offers us symbolic levers for an understanding and appropriation of our lives. The young contemporary Burundian literature is best understood in this context, which is of an attempt to understand its environment and express its sensibility to the world.

In his academic book La Littérature de langue française au Burundi, [2] Professor J. Ngorwanubusa of the University of Burundi regrets however the few avenues for the literature of Burundi. There is barely any publishing house; a few reviews had been existing in the 1960s and 1970s but never survived except a few Christian reviews run by a few members of the Burundi Catholic Church.

But the interested literary person won’t miss the corners behind the central market where the old (often stolen!) books are sold, the oldest book storeLibrairie St Paul, or the French cultural center (whose interesting café hosts the unfortunately more and more penniless intellectuals in the city!) and of course the newly opened Lire Africa in Gallerie Alexander, specializing in fiction from Africa. A blog by the poet Thierry Manirambona (“la plume burundaise”) lists an impressive archeology of Burundian books old and new, and a few poets do publish their poetry directly on the internet as the acclaimed Ketty Nivyabandi.

Poetry in print might be hard to find in the country, but if you are insisting you will discover the underground intellectual and literary scene of the marvelous Café literaire Samandari that meets every Thursday evening at the Burundi Palace right in the middle of the city center. But one should say they met there, for since a year now these meetings are no longer held. (more…)

An attempt to chart the origins and evolution of modern poetry in Malaysia unearths complex historical processes and cultural interactions that have shaped contemporary Malaysian society. To speak of the writing of poetry in Malaysia, one must grapple with – or at least try to imagine – the essentially pluralist and polyglot nature of its people as well as the changing socio-cultural landscape, where “the map of a thousand lives will be seen* ”.

Malaysia is a country where at least four main languages predominate – Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil, further punctuated by a multitude of dialects and colloquialisms according to clan or region. The multicultural and multilingual population of the Malay Peninsula has been evident since at least the 15th century, when the Sultanate of Malacca rose to become one of the most thriving entrepôts in Asia, drawing merchants, scholars, and envoys from neighbouring kingdoms and faraway empires alike. Successive waves of immigrants from all over the Malay Archipelago, China, and India – some of whom settled, intermarried, and formed new distinct communities and cultures such as the peranakan or Straits-born communities – added yet more layers to the inextricable diversity of Malaysian society.

The conquest of Malacca by Portuguese (1511) and Dutch (1641) imperial powers preceded British colonial control, and later the Japanese occupation, of the Malay Peninsula and the northern provinces of Borneo. Each of these imperialist presences left an indelible mark on the cultural landscape of Malaysia, including on the Malay language in the case of Portuguese, Dutch and English, adding to the vast compendium of loanwords in Malay from Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Chinese. The Malay language served as a lingua franca for the Malay Archipelago for centuries, and forms the basis of the standardised national languages of both Malaysia (Bahasa Malaysia) and Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia), mutually intelligible with some differences in vocabulary and spelling.

Oral traditions and pan-Malay poets

The origins of Malay-language poetry can be traced to the vast and various oral traditions that have been cradled in the Malay Archipelago as well as classical Malay texts known as Hikayat that date back as far as the 14th century. Traditional Malay poetic forms include the syair, the pantun, the gurindamand seloka, all of which are found in both oral and written literature. While traditional or classical, many of these poetic forms are intrinsically innovative, urging improvisation and spontaneous composition. The pantun, for instance, was sometimes performed as balaspantun, a call-and-response ‘duel’ or ‘flirtation’ between two poets, especially during performances of the Dondang Sayang (love ballads) of Malacca. (more…)

It has become a tradition over the past years that we use World Poetry Day on March 21 to focus on a specific aspect or topic of the poetry world. The situation of refugees has a sad currentness all over the world today and it affects also poets, in their personal life and in their writing.

photo: Department for International Development/K. Joseph

We asked a handful of “lyrikline-poets” who have a personal relation to this topic to answer a written interview to share their ideas and experiences. Each of the poets got a questionnaire and was
free to chose from a range of questions. The answers that reached us are remarkable, important, and moving and we would like to thank all the poets very much for openly speaking about their opinions and events in their life.

Mansur Rajih was born in Yemen in 1958 where he was imprisoned for 15 years. He came to Stavanger City of Refuge in Norway in 1998.

Lyrikline Blog (LB): Where do you come from and why did you leave your country of origin?

Mansur Rajih (MR): I came to Norway from Yemen after a lengthy international campaign. I was a prisoner of conscience. They arrested me for exercising my freedom of expression about life in a dictatorship And my activity in the field of struggle for democracy and human rights. I was in prison for 15 years.

LB: In your view, is it the task of a poet also to be a chronicler or witness of his/her time?

MR: To create a poem is an act of beauty. An author must be – not a witness, but involved and active. I believe in seeing, acting and being alive through writing poetry. Life is full of forces that we must counteract.

LB: What impact on society or politics can a poem have? Do oppressive regimes have to fear poetry?

Lyrikline Blog (LB):In your view, is it the task of a poet also to be a chronicler or witness of his/her time?

Diana Vallejo (DV): The poetry itself is a result of what you think, your reflections, your deep beliefs and fears, what you feel, those desires or hopes that we have. In certain social conditions this deep view of our humanity will have a certain line and shape, a map of what we are living or knowing about our surroundings, even the geography will be an influence in that poem. For me the written poem is the last result of our vulnerability like a human being. In my case it is not a task, but it is inevitable that I show or tell that special place or chronicle that lives through me again, so the action of publishing a poem in the paper converts me to some kind of witness of any field. For example I can say that I witness a person, or a bird or a country, the space, or the life, so yes it can be a task, but is not an obligation, you decide that. To write or not to write is very similar to … to be or not to be.

LB:What impact on society or politics can a poem have? Do oppressive regimes have to fear poetry?

DV: Fear? I don’t think so, because they don’t care about human life and they really don’t understand the content of humanity. But shame, yes, they feel shame, (more…)